Carl W. Kenney II is an award winning columnist and novelist. He is committed to engaging readers into a meaningful discussion related to matters that impact faith and society. He grapples with pondering the impact faith has on public space while seeking to understand how public space both hinders and enhances the walk of faith.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Pregnancy as Punishment, or, When the Pro-Life Movement is Evil

The Rev-elution welcomes Amy Laura Hall as a
contributor to the blog. Hall writes a blog called Profligate Grace: Notes from
an Irreverent Reverend (and Friends). She isAssociate Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University, the Divinity School. Hall is the author of Kierkegaard and the
Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of
Biotechnological Reproduction, and numerous scholarly articles in theological
and biomedical ethics. Her current book projects are Erecting the Pulpit:
Muscular Christianity from Victoria to Viagra and Good Housekeeping with Lady
Julian.

Some religious and political leaders have cynically
tapped into fear of sexual anarchy in order to promote the pro-life
movement.I contend this is not only not
pro-life, but that it pisses God off.

There is a
subterranean and sometimes right-smack-in-your face anxiety that some Christian
men and women have about sex without consequence.There is a current running within
Christianity that sexuality is dangerous unless channeled toward a clear and
discernible purpose beyond the two people beloved by one another.Different writers in the Christian tradition
have emphasized varying purposes for sexual desire, but some Christians seem to
focus in almost exclusively on one – pregnancy.Sexual desire is God’s way of making babies, so the implicit argument
sometimes goes, and if I experience desire apart from that purpose, I have
failed to give God God’s due.But the
form of the question distorts the answer.If one begins with the root anxiety that sexuality is anarchic unless
purposed, then the answer of “child” becomes punitive.Parenthood becomes the price that women and men
must pay for desiring their beloved.

This is a
gnarled-up twist of a significant strand in Christian body politics, and it
distorts the witness that children are a gift.When this strand starts by being twisted with fear of sexuality,
children are a due punishment for desire – an act of justice that, if
circumvented, supposedly can turn God’s creation into a ghastly mess of wanton
abandon.

I have to give
credit where credit is due.My oldest
daughter named this years ago at a pro-life event where I had been invited to
speak.She was about 12 at the time, and
sorting through her own sense of sexuality.I had done a fairly good job, I pray, in conveying that her body is not
dangerously ridden with desire, but beautifully created by a God who wants her
to know joy.In conversation with the
men at the event (and men significantly outnumbered women at this particular
event) she picked up on the sense that, for too many of them, pregnancy is
retribution for sexuality itself.She
picked up on the fact that too many of the men there had a kind of loathing
about sexuality, and a sense that sexuality without due consequence is the root
of many other evils.She used the term
“creepy” to summarize the event.She was
right.It was creepy.

This way of thinking
may be particularly attractive during times of generalized fear over matters
that don’t have a fig to do with whether or not a woman wants to have
non-procreative sex with her beloved.When people can’t find work, when elders have a sense that things are
changing too fast, when more and more of my neighbors speak a different
language than mine, when we fight two brutal wars that seem to have resolved
nothing, well, maybe at least we can make women who have sex pay their due.I’m not saying this is a conscious,
front-of-my-brain sort of impulse.It is
often buried deep down in the moral gut of a Christian imagination – restore
societal order by making this one core fact of life “simple” again.Sex = Baby.

And in the
visceral logic of this thinking, cutting social programs for women and children
may, for some pro-life people, make perfect sense.Why should others be forced to pay for your
individual inability to control your sexual desire, or for your community’s
inability properly to discipline your people’s desire?Children are the consequence of your urges,
and you should pay for their food/education/care yourself.And/Or, your community/neighborhood/culture
has become wanton with sexual anarchy, and the right way to correct this is for
you people to have to bear more babies and begin to deal with the due
consequences of your sexual anarchy.This is the pro-life version of the “your child, your choice, your
responsibility” economics that I named in my second book as a constant danger
of pro-choice liberalism.

This is also
why being anti-abortion and pro-death penalty makes perfect sense to some
people.Both children and the death
penalty are about justice – about what people should be forced to pay for their
actions.People who have sex should pay
with birth.People who commit particular
crimes should pay with their lives.

I call poop on
this mess.Whatever a Christian theology
of the body was meant to be, it can’t be this.

1 comment:

Oh, thank God! The writer uses critical thinking! I felt my entire body become more alert as I read this learned academic and author. Now I want to read Hall's other books. A sharp eye which sees through the lie is powerful, clarifying and delightful. I would love to see Hall take on such a helpful revelation regarding the lust for guns in our Nation.

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Carl W. Kenney II

Carl was named the best serious columnist of 2011 by the North Carolina Press Association for his work with the News & Observer's community paper The Durham News and in 2016 by the Missouri Press Association for his columns in the Columbia Missourian. He is a columnist with the News & Observer and Co-Executive Producer of "God of the Oppressed" an upcoming documentary film on black liberation theology. He is a former Adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri - School of Journalism and Adjunct Instructor at Duke University, the Center for Documentary Studies. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He furthered his education at Duke University and attained a Master of Divinity. He was named a Fellow in Pastoral Leadership Development at the Princeton Theological Seminary on May 14, 2005. He is a freelance writer with his commentary appearing in The Washington Post, Religious News Services,The Independent Weekly and The Durham Herald-Sun. Carl is the author of two novels: “Preacha’ Man” and the sequel “Backslide”.
He has led congregations in Missouri and North Carolina